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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23097379">New Horizons</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmIa/pseuds/ArmIa'>ArmIa</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Doom (Video Games), どうぶつの森 | Animal Crossing Series</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Black Comedy, Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Violence, Comedy, Crossover, Crossovers &amp; Fandom Fusions, Demons, Developing Friendships, Friendship, Gen, Hell, Implied/Referenced Torture, Major Character Injury, No Smut, No Spoilers, Nonverbal Character, Nonverbal Communication, POV Second Person, Platonic Cuddling, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Platonic Relationships, Religious Imagery &amp; Symbolism, Tone Shift, Touch-Starved, no animals die</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 13:00:20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>17,031</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23097379</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmIa/pseuds/ArmIa</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>You have stood alone against the assembled hordes of Hell, your rage unquenched, your strength unyielding. Stories of your conquest  strike fear into the blackened hearts of the doomed, but now you face a new challenge. Stranded in a world that is not your own, you will be called upon to lead, and with the guidance of an enthusiastic shih tzu, you may yet find your redemption. </p><p>A crossover spawned of the greatest inter-fandom friendship the internet has ever seen, chronicling the unlikely friendship between a slayer and a secretary.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>The Marine | Doomguy/Shizue | Isabelle</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>205</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>663</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Slayer's Testament</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Shout-outs to ajunkersgamble and ToyTowns for inspiring me to take a shitpost seriously enough that it resulted in an actual fanfic, and to all the innumerable, beautiful souls on the internet who have contributed fan art and memes to the most wholesome fandom friendship I have ever been lucky enough to witness. I hope those of you reading this enjoy my contribution.</p>
    </blockquote><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Surrounded by enemies. </p><p>Knee-deep in the dead. </p><p>Alone.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Your world is a Bosch canvas, torn red in the madness of pain and rage. </p><p>You are a craftsman. Your work is exquisite and terrible. Your tools are the shotgun, the rifle, the rocket launcher. </p><p>You are a sculptor. You work in meat and bone. An industrial tool meant for felling trees becomes a surgical instrument in your hands. Giants feel the bite of its blade, chewing their legs out from under them. Sometimes, you allow them to writhe helplessly for a few seconds, letting them bask in anguish before granting them the cruel mercy of a boot to the skull. </p><p>When the ammo has run dry, your fists go to work. Flesh tears like wet cardboard. Bones splinter as if cast from glass. You punch, gouge and snap. You twist limbs to impossible angles and then keep twisting. You find handholds in jawbones, ribcages, between plates of chitinous armor and curved horns of yellowed ivory. </p><p>It is not enough to simply kill these monsters; you must unmake them. Their existence is an affront to you, an insult that must not go unanswered.</p><p>Hell disgorges its cursed champions from deep within its bowels, and you meet them with swift and unrelenting brutality. Those that run towards you are annihilated so fast that it might be called mercy by your standards. Those that run away from you are right to fear you, but fear cannot save them any more than their hatred can.</p><p>You will find them. You always find them. It is only then, when they are powerless to do anything about it, will they truly understand what it is to fear you.</p><p>Many fight you because they know nothing else. These are the ones that have earned your pity, though pity does not stay your hand.</p><p>They are the dead, and they did not die easily.</p><p>You try not to trouble yourself with the human cost of this crusade, for they were dead long before you found them. The once-living husks that shamble towards you with grasping hands, jaws agape in a death rattle that begs to be allowed to become a scream, some with rigid fingers that still work the triggers of weapons they held in life, these are the lowliest of Hell’s ranks. The wretched parody of their existence is a spiteful allegory for the contempt demons hold humanity in.</p><p>The lucky ones died at the teeth and claws of the first wave, while the truly unfortunate were resurrected, and must wait to die again by your hand before they are freed. They are prisoners in bodies they no longer control. Their shackles are their bones, and only you can break them.</p><p>Sometimes you see them shuffling about rooms before they have registered your presence, fingers stabbing uselessly at buttons or scribbling on clipboards with pens sealed into their fists by rigor mortis. The ones that carry guns and wear uniforms drag themselves along the same routes they patrolled in life. Some simply stand and stare at nothing, and when they notice you they reach for you as if in desperation, begging to be liberated from the horrors they have become.</p><p>You try not to wonder whether they are aware of what has happened to them, or whether the stiff, awkward re-enactments of their lives are something left over from the people they used to be, hard-wired into the rotted matter of their brains. You try not to think about the fact that you seldom encounter them alone, and always find them clustered together in groups, standing in brightly-lit areas where demons prefer to lurk in the dark.</p><p>You try not to think about it, but sometimes you just cannot help it. It makes you feel a little sad, but mostly it just makes you angry. You already have plenty of anger to fuel the flames of your crusade.</p><p>The ones borne of Hell itself are the ones you reserve your hatred for, and your reserves are vast. The depths of your hatred are enough to drown oceans of warriors, strong enough to crumble whatever barricades they erect to stand in your way. Your righteous fury burns like a sun against the shadows of their malfeasance, routing them out from the holes they lurk in and leaving them no choice but to fight against a foe that has killed scores of them already.</p><p>They know they cannot stand against you, and so you leave them no choice. They do not deserve that luxury. Not after everything they have done.</p><p>Humanity has sinned and been forgiven. It is not for you to say whether that forgiveness was rightly deserved, but whatever their sins, nobody has earned the kind of suffering you have seen. Each snapped limb, each hideous face pounded into hamburger or blasted asunder by shot is a mere fraction of what the hordes of Hell deserve.</p><p>You exact vengeance by inches, chipping away at their ranks, tormenting the powers that command them that even they cannot hide from you forever. Their destruction is an inevitability, carried to its logical conclusion by the passage of time itself.</p><p>You have become intimately acquainted with your enemies in the time you’ve spent fighting them, familiarizing yourself with the way their bodies are built so as to more efficiently dismantle them. You have even elected to name some of them; whether they have names for their own kind, you neither know nor care.</p><p>The lithely built humanoids that hurl lumps of flame at you from afar- you have come to think of them as <em>Imps</em>- are a little tougher than humans, which would go some lengths to explaining why those on the base fared so poorly against them when they came in such large numbers.</p><p>For you, any difference between them and the former humans is inconsequential. Their bones break and their flesh tears all the same. The larger, boar-like beasts that you have dubbed <em>Pinkies</em> for the hue of their leathery hides are tougher still, yet you have seen them to slaughter in their masses like the cattle they almost resemble.</p><p>The other echelons of their ranks were christened by scientists, cracked computer screens and tablets retrieved from half-eaten bodies a testament to the doomed studies of another realm that they had to put into familiar, earthly terms in order to quantify.</p><p>The name <em> Mancubus </em> is a play on words, a portmanteau of <em> succubus </em> and the Latin for <em> glutton</em>. It was given by the researchers of the UAC to grotesque, lumbering mountains of flesh with blubber thick enough to stop armor-piercing rounds and mean little eyes set in chinless heads. The one-eyed, spherical beasts that are little more than floating stomachs with grinning, razor-lined mouths were given the name <em> Cacodemon</em>, which appropriately translates to <em> evil spirit</em>.</p><p><em> Revenant </em> is perhaps the most fitting appellation of all, taken from a word meaning <em> one who has risen from the dead </em>and ascribed to towering skeletons clad in mechanical armor and outfitted with rocket launchers.</p><p>Such horrors are the stuff of nightmares, with no reason to exist in a world governed by the science of logic and reason. They take pleasure in tormenting their victims. You know this because one as well versed as you in the infliction of pain and death knows how to kill efficiently, and how to kill in such a way that the victim’s death becomes interminable. You recognize the signs of torture when you see it on the bodies of slain humans, the ones who were too badly mutilated to be worth resurrecting as soldiers. </p><p>You do not torture your foes, because even war has a high ground, and there are depths to which even you will never allow yourself to sink. What you do may be vicious and depraved, but there is no pleasure to be had in it, merely the satisfaction of a job well done. It is a necessity; a task dutifully performed to maintain the balance of things. It is not a good thing, but it is a righteous thing. It is as close to justice as one can reasonably hope for in this world. </p><p>Thousands of people died when the gates of Hell first opened. Thousands of demons must therefore be killed in turn.</p><p>Truthfully, however, you have not been keeping count.</p><p>Bodies are heaped like firewood in corridors and rooms already traveled, torn limbs scattered amongst heaps of gore, blackened by explosive combustion, bones splintered by your fists.</p><p>You doubt it will ever be enough, but some small measure of vengeance is better than nothing at all. The inferno of your rage may never be extinguished. Evil may never be truly vanquished. If that is the case, then so be it. You will fight them for as long as is necessary, whether to avenge those who have already been slain or spare others from a similar fate.</p><p>You fall like a thunderbolt into their ranks, scattering them like leaves to the wind, sowing panic with each passing second as it becomes apparent that you simply refuse to be killed. Corrosive bile and wadded sulfur sizzles against the plates of your armor. The heat is so intense that the skin beneath prickles and blisters. Some get close enough to bite or claw you, but you barely register it even when they manage to breach your armor.</p><p>Rage is your sword, your shield, the oil in your lamp. Their hatred of you simply masks their fear, and the violent heat of your anger tears it away like a fresh scab to expose a festering wound beneath.</p><p>Imp limbs snap like toothpicks. You gouge a Cacodemon’s eye with your fist, the force of your punch carrying your arm into it up to the joint of your elbow until you are wearing its deflated corpse like a glove. A shotgun blast cuts a Revenant in half, and as its torso claws at your ankles you crush its skull beneath your heel. A Pinky’s jaws clamp onto your arm; you wrench one of its teeth free with almost no effort at all and ram it back into a part of its face where teeth do not belong.</p><p>A Mancubus turns its stubby flamethrower arms on you, and you push through the roiling heat until you are close enough to take in the smell of its unwashed bulk, a horrendous stench that overpowers even the acrid tang of the smoke and flames. It takes some effort to punch through the thick folds of its gut, but you succeed in pulling out the misshapen lump of its fat-encrusted heart, granting it the privilege of seeing the still-beating organ pulsing in your grip before you crush it into jelly.</p><p>The rest of its innards rush to evacuate the collapsing structure of its bloated corpse through the hole your fist made, and as it collapses on top of you, you find yourself gaining a very uncomfortable understanding of the term <em>dead weight.</em></p><p>A cloven hoof stamps down on your arm as you struggle to pull yourself free of the Mancubus’ gurgling corpse. Flecks of saliva spray your visor as the Hell Knight roars down at you, thousands of pounds of Herculean musculature rippling beneath a hide of tanned leather, pinning you in place. The spectacle could rightly be described as terrifying, but to you the gesture is meaningless, foolish bravado borne of misplaced confidence.</p><p>The creatures are akin to nobility in Hell. They are enforcers and commanders, built and bred for combat, their appetites for violence whetted by gladiatorial combat before they are unleashed upon the battlefield to terrorise those who would stand against Hell’s conquests of other realms.</p><p>This means nothing to you. </p><p>You pound your fist into its ankle, and a jagged spike of bone ruptures the meat of its leg. The brute topples, and the last thing it sees is the folly of its premature celebration reflected in your visor before you turn its head like a steering wheel. </p><p>The metal floor is slick with gore. A yellow plastic sign chidingly warns you to watch your step as you struggle to push yourself onto your hands and knees. The ground resists your attempts to stand up. A spongy carpet of meat grows like moss on a stone beneath you, and gives way as you push against it. </p><p>More demons flood into the chamber. Your shotgun becomes a crutch. You fire both barrels, crawling through the jagged passageway carved by the buckshot, and finally manage to right yourself. You thumb more shells into the breech, pump the slide, and fire at anything that has the poor sense to move. The bodies mount like sandbags. The demons swarm, trampling their dead and wounded in frenzied eagerness, spurred to action more by desperation than any tangible hope of victory. </p><p>Every inch of space around you is filled by enemies. It becomes impossible to miss. Claws rake your back and shoulders, and your fists meet your aggressors before you can even process what is attacking you. Pinkies plough through the massed ranks of lesser demons and former humans, snorting and hissing, driven by animal instinct to attack. </p><p>A Hell Knight catches a stray fireball that was meant for you; they are proud creatures, and for an instant you are temporarily forgotten as it rounds on the offending Imp and pulls its head off, hurling the body into the path of a shotgun blast, unwittingly shielding itself from the buckshot. </p><p>The shredded remains knock your weapon askew. Your visor is smeared with claret, and as a fist the size of a basketball collides with the back of your helmet, the blood is suddenly on the inside as well. </p><p>Your nose is broken. One eye is swollen so badly that you could barely see even if not for the blood. </p><p>A porcine snarl heralds the approach of a charging Pinkie; your breastplate spares you the worst of the impact, but roughshod nubs of bone scrape your flesh as it rears back for another charge. The butt of your shotgun kicks against broken ribs, filling your chest with napalm that ignites as you draw breath. The Pinkie’s death knell is a gurgle as the buckshot finds its way to the creature’s brain by way of its mouth. </p><p>The Hell Knight is still standing. It swings at you in a wide, clumsy arc, sloppy and overeager. You fire the shotgun at a massive outline in a haze of red. </p><p>The pain in your chest is irrelevant. It is a resource to be drawn on as you see fit, more kindling for the flame of your rage. The demon’s hatred of you is undisciplined and fearful, a poor substitute for the strength afforded to you by your anger. </p><p>It learns this the hard way, as some lessons can only be learned. </p><p>You follow the shotgun blast with your fingers, finding ground zero, feeling something soft and pulpy between the leathery hide. </p><p>You rip and tear. The beast is huge. That means it has huge guts. </p><p>You rip and tear until it is done. </p><p>After that, there is quiet and stillness. You hear your own heartbeat, your own breathing, and not much else. </p><p>There is nothing left to kill in the room. You suppose that thought should make you angry, but for some reason it doesn’t. </p><p>You no longer feel angry. You just feel tired. </p><p>You trudge across a carpet of meat and bone with only a vague sense of where to go next. Generally, you elect to go where there are more things to kill. Sometimes you push buttons, or scrounge amongst corpses for keycards to open doors that resist even your strength, and you do not wish to waste ammunition on.</p><p>Occasionally, you look for supplies. </p><p>Ammunition is precious, but unimportant at present. You have a handful of shells left. The chainsaw has a half tank of fuel. Many former humans still carry the weapons they died fighting with. You can always find more ammunition. Failing that, your fists will serve you as they always have, but your body is like any other piece of equipment. It needs to be maintained in order to work. </p><p>You stumble through an office, then a hangar, then a break room. Your eyes scour desks and work surfaces, tables strewn with half-eaten meals and sheafs of crumpled, dirtied papers, searching for the green cross of a first aid kit and not finding one. You cannot muster the energy to be angry at this, either. Mild annoyance is the best your mind can manage while your broken ribs, punctured flesh, bruised limbs and weary bones petulantly demand respite they have not yet earned. </p><p>Denial becomes bargaining becomes acceptance. One more step, then one more. Surely there must be a medical kit in the next room. Or the next room. Or the next. One foot in front of the other. Keep going, just like you always do. What else can you do when there is nothing left to kill? Pain is a resource that must not be wasted. You must channel it into something useful. </p><p>There is a map of the facility on the wall before you. It has been rendered an incomprehensible mess by bloodstains and scorch marks. You acknowledge its unhelpfulness with a jerk of your finger. The motion draws fresh protests from your ribs. A poster beside it reminds you that PROGRESS TAKES SACRIFICE. You wonder what the headless corpse slumped beneath it would make of that slogan.</p><p>For a moment, you feel as though you might get angry again before ultimately deciding there’s no point.  </p><p>The corpse is wearing a white coat. A scientist? A doctor? You paw through the sticky recesses of the fabric, but find nothing useful. A few pens. A handful of loose change bearing the symbol of the UAC, only redeemable at the vending machines in this facility that dispense food in plastic trays, ready for immediate consumption so you can finish your meal in the time allotted for your break and get back to work. </p><p>You also find a photograph of a young woman you suppose could be called pretty, if you gave thought to such things. She’s smiling at the camera. You haven’t seen a smile in such a long time, and for a moment you are mesmerized by it. </p><p>You tuck the photograph back into the coat, mainly because you don’t know quite what else to do with it. </p><p>You keep walking.</p><p>When you eventually stumble across a medical kit, it has been emptied. Rather than infuriating, you find this faintly baffling. The invasion happened so quickly that there would have been almost no chance of it being used to patch up a wound.</p><p>Demons do not take prisoners, much less give their wounded medical attention. Perhaps someone else took the contents and left the box itself, thinking that they might have an opportunity to use the bandages and syringes and tourniquets within it, but surely the inventory would be easier to carry within some kind of container?</p><p>Perhaps you are foolish to question the logic in such a decision. Nothing makes sense in this place. The only sane place left to be is behind a trigger, but with nothing to shoot at, even your shotgun has lost its meaning. </p><p>The thought seems almost heretical when it has got you this far. As if sensing your doubt, a pre-recorded message plays over a speaker system that, against all odds, is still in working order. The relaxed but jovial voice of a UAC spokesperson addresses the workers who are no longer around to hear it, advising them to “buddy up” when venturing out onto the planet’s surface. Every syllable is weighted with false conviviality that could almost be interpreted as genuine concern for one’s safety and well-being if one wasn’t as familiar as you are with the way the UAC operates.</p><p>Your fingers squeeze the shotgun’s weathered wooden furniture. It is your anchor, your lifeline, your most treasured possession. It is the closest thing to a friend that you have in this entire godforsaken place. It is the one you buddy up with during your forays into the nightmares that wait in every room and hallway. It serves you without complaint, asking nothing in return except a steady supply of ammunition. It has done nothing to warrant such disrespect. </p><p>Not for the first time, you wonder if you are going mad. That, in turn, raises the issue of whether you were ever sane to begin with. </p><p>Neither question is one you are eager to see answered. You drag your weary body onwards while your heads-up display pulses like a heartbeat, displaying a number that is supposed to give an indication of your health. 100 is its way of telling you that you are in the peak of physical condition, that any injuries you have sustained thus far have been artificially healed by whatever is in those health packs; an all-in-one cocktail of lab-grown concoctions, perhaps, capable of knitting flesh, staunching bleeding, soothing burns and knitting bones. Perhaps it’s some kind of nanotechnology that allows your wounds to be healed so quickly after it is administered. As long as it gets you back up to 100, you don’t care to know the science behind it. </p><p>At present, the figure your HUD is displaying is significantly less than 100. Looks like your body is going to have to take care of itself the old-fashioned way. </p><p>An automated door registers your presence as you approach it, obligingly sliding open and waiting patiently as you enter the brightly-lit, invitingly empty room beyond. There is nothing to shoot at, nothing to shoot with, and nothing to heal yourself with. Instead, there is a train. A computerized voice cheerfully announces that it is the shuttle for the Deimos Facility, and politely requests that all personnel be seated for departure. </p><p>You take the words as an invitation, moving as if in a daze. It is an uncomfortable feeling, having no clear objective, but you can do little else. </p><p>You ease yourself into your seat, keeping the shotgun in your lap. Just because there are no enemies present doesn’t mean there’s no possibility of more appearing. The weapon’s weathered wooden furniture and dull metal barrels are as much of an anachronism as your battle-worn armor against the sleek, sterile whiteness of the tram’s construction. The seats are plush but rigid, with some kind of artificial coating that is supposed to emulate the look of leather at a fraction of the cost. An ordinary person would doubtless find it uncomfortable, but comfort is a meaningless abstract to you; something as tame as discomfort, like the dull twinge of your broken ribs every time you breathe or move your arms, is a rarity in this place. </p><p>The computer’s voice warns you to stand clear of the closing doors, as though it senses on some level that you have already seen any number of unfortunate souls crushed, bisected, or otherwise mutilated by the facility’s hastily-enacted lockdown protocols. You know to be wary of doors by this point. </p><p>There is a gentle rumble as the tram sets off, which is soon replaced by the hum of engines. The seats tremble ever so slightly. The vibrations are curiously relaxing, and you allow the taut muscles beneath your armor to loosen somewhat, letting out slow, steady breaths so as not to invoke more protests from your ribs. </p><p>How long has it been since you allowed yourself to rest? The brief interludes between demon encounters are spent scavenging for weapons, ammunition, medical supplies and key cards, checking sealed doors and reconnoitering empty hallways and rooms until you happen across more things to kill. This can hardly be called rest. </p><p>It occurs to you that you are only taking this break because you have been forced to, and you find yourself resenting the way respite has been thrust upon you, unwanted charity from a spiteful, uncaring universe that stood witness to everything you’ve endured and finally decided that you’ve earned a moment of peace. </p><p>Upon reflection, perhaps it is not for your benefit. Perhaps it has taken pity on the hordes of Hell, and elected to spare them from your brutality for a moment. </p><p>This thought does not comfort you. You have not earned peace. Hell does not deserve it. </p><p>Again, you find yourself wanting to be angry, but you simply haven’t the energy for it. Combat feeds upon your rage but also fuels it, a circle of life and death that will carry itself along the same inevitable path until the circle is finally broken by your destruction or theirs. Without victory, there can be no peace; only a momentary ceasefire, a fleeting microcosm of an interminable conflict. </p><p>Without anything to direct your rage towards, you sit in impotent, simmering disquiet. Yes, you <em>could</em> go to work on your surroundings. You could crush the padded plastic seats and shatter the reinforced windows, rip the console from its housing and tear out its mechanical innards as easily as a living target, but what would that accomplish? Wanton destruction is a waste of ammunition and energy that you do not have to spare. You are precise and purposeful in the application of your strength. You will batter down a locked door or destroy an uncooperative computer console hindering your progress, but you will not use your strength on anything that does not necessitate it. </p><p>Destruction for its own sake is the pursuit of bored demons with no more living playthings upon which to vent their twisted desires. You are not like them. </p><p>And so you sit, your fingers twitching towards your shotgun’s trigger at every sound. Every clunk of machinery or distant groan of burdened architecture is a potential threat, an ambush waiting to be sprung.</p><p>You have given up hope of finding any living humans left in this place. With the culling of innocents carried to its horrific conclusion, all that remain are targets. A planet-wide free fire zone. A ghoulish turkey shoot with so many turkeys ripe for the taking, fattened from gorging themselves on the meat and blood of the innocent, their numbers bolstered with the puppeteered bodies of the slain. </p><p>You should surely find the thought of coming battles encouraging, but you can’t find it within yourself to even look forward to going back to work. It is not something you do for fun, but simply because it must be done. </p><p>The banality of your endless crusade against a foe you are not sure can even be completely annihilated is becoming more apparent with each passing second. They cannot kill you, and for every one of them that you kill, Hell spawns another wretch to take its place, fated to the same end as whatever came before it. It seems almost tedious when framed in such terms. </p><p>You sigh, and your reward for your absent-mindedness is a renewed ache in your chest. You lean back in your seat, unable to muster anything more than mild irritation, and your surroundings plunge into darkness as the tram enters a tunnel.</p><p>The hum of the engines alters slightly in pitch, but you don’t give it much thought until you wake up. </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Exodus</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>A moment of respite. </p>
<p>A friendly face.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>You wake up on a train, though you do not recall allowing yourself to fall asleep. </p>
<p>It is not the same train you fell asleep on. </p>
<p>Your shotgun is still in your lap. Your palm wraps around the weathered wooden grip, knuckles white beneath your gauntlets. Your finger hooks through the trigger guard as you pull it against your shoulder. Your gaze snaps back and forth in birdlike movements as you scan your surroundings. </p>
<p>The bland sterility of the shuttle’s metal and plastic construction has been replaced by warm, earthy tones of wood, cast in the yellowish glow of lamps rather than the harsh whiteness of the overhead lighting strips favored by the UAC. The seat beneath you is well-worn, the plump cushions sagging accommodatingly beneath the tonnage of your armored bulk.</p>
<p>The subdued, electronic hum of the engines has been replaced by the chuffing of steam-driven pistons and the gentle rumbling of drivers that carry the train car across the tracks rather than above them by means of magnetic levitation. </p>
<p>A scraping sound from the aisle behind you draws your attention. It is the sound of a door opening, though you wouldn’t have guessed this before turning to look. You have grown so used to doors that open with the push of a button or slide open upon registering your presence that the idea of opening a door by hand is foreign to you, save for the occasions on which a mechanism has become stuck and can only be opened by brute strength. </p>
<p>A bizarre, arrhythmic babbling sound unlike anything you’ve ever heard before emanates from the figure standing before you. Had it screeched, hissed or roared at you, you would have turned its face to mulch and perhaps taken a few moments to ponder its corpse after you’d made sure that it was the only one of its kind, but it neither sounds nor looks like like any demon you’ve ever encountered before, and you have encountered many. </p>
<p>It is humanoid; disproportionately so, yet not in a way that is inherently threatening or unpleasant to look at. If the demons you have encountered thus far in your crusade were drawn from a child’s nightmares, all sinewy, distended limbs and jagged teeth and claws, then this one must have come from a picture book. </p>
<p>Its ears are large and pointed. Its mouth is a thin, curved line, a smile that displays no teeth. Its eyes are red, but not the mean little embers that smolder hatefully in the faces of Imps, begging to be gouged by your strong fingers, inviting you to get a good grip and ram it into the nearest hard surface available. </p>
<p>Not content to merely line their bank accounts with the spoils of military contracts, pharmaceuticals, space travel and experimental gateways to Hell, the industrial giant of the Union Aerospace Corporation has also taken to manufacturing “UACguy” figurines, toy soldiers with stubby limbs and oversized heads. The figures are modeled on the UAC’s own private military forces, and are popular with collectors of all ages.</p>
<p>The creature you see before you has more in common with these toys than any demon you have ever encountered or slain. </p>
<p>It seems expectant, waiting for a response to its babbling vocalizations, and no sooner has this thought occurred to you than a line of text scrolls across the bottom of your HUD. </p>
<p>
  <em> Oh! Excuse me! I have a quick question for you. </em>
</p>
<p>The creature looks like a cat, you realize. Granted, it walks on two legs and appears to be wearing a sweater vest, but the pointed ears, the long tail that sways to and fro behind it, even the inquisitive diamond-shaped pupils of its eyes resemble nothing so much as those of a domestic feline. </p>
<p>And yet…it can talk. </p>
<p>It’s talking to you. </p>
<p>“It’s now 7:17 a.m. on March 20th, 2020, right?”</p>
<p>It’s asking you for the time. </p>
<p>You stare at the words, your already burdened mind struggling to make sense of the mounting impossibility of this situation.  </p>
<p>A cat is asking you for the time. </p>
<p>The cat also seems to think the year is 2020. </p>
<p>You’ve spent so long fighting the forces of Hell in the labyrinthine corridors and yawning hangars of the UAC’s facilities that the passage of time has become a meaningless abstract, recorded only in steps taken, enemies killed, battles won. You count in increments of rounds per minute, in seconds spent running your chainsaw and whether it has the fuel necessary to chew through a given quantity of flesh, muscle or bone. </p>
<p>Whether outside on the barren surface of a planet a hundred and fifty million miles from Earth or stalking the hallways of a facility housed on it, “natural” light is practically nonexistent, the days near-impossible to measure as a result. </p>
<p>You have no idea what month it is, let alone the date, but the last time you checked, it was the early 22nd century. To have lost months or perhaps even a year seems plausible whilst locked in the interminable trajectory of your blood-soaked swathe through Hell’s unending ranks, but to have lost an entire century is simply impossible- not least because logic dictates that time travels forwards, not backwards. </p>
<p>That being said, your existence seems to have ceased being governed by logic quite some time ago. </p>
<p>Teleporting across space by means of technologies that even the UAC itself doesn’t quite understand (although their PR department are quite firmly opposed to calling it magic) has become commonplace, just another facet of your day-to-day routine as scavenging for tools with which to wreak havoc upon the denizens of Hell.</p>
<p>You’ve apparently found yourself in a place inhabited by talking cats rather than demons, so why should time travel seem outlandish to you? If the chaos of war and the horror of demonic invasions are the metric by which you measure normality, who are you to decide what is normal? </p>
<p>Apparently interpreting your silence- or perhaps some minute twitch of your helmet- as assent, the cat beams at you. </p>
<p>“Thanks!” it says, the indecipherable staccato of its speech materializing as words on your HUD. “Do you mind if I sit here? I promise not to fall asleep on you and start drooling on your shirt! Or, uh...armor, I guess?”</p>
<p>It plops into the seat opposite you with blithe indifference to the shotgun barrels hovering inches from its smiling face, plainly unbothered by the fact that it is half a pound of of trigger pressure away from a violent death, and that the only things staying your hand are the lack of overt hostility in its movements and your own bafflement at the oddness of this entire scenario. </p>
<p>“Not much of a talker, are you?” the cat observes, still smiling. “That’s okay. I was going to sit here anyway.”</p>
<p>You stare at it. It beams at its own reflection in your visor. </p>
<p>“I’m Rover, by the way. What’s your name?”</p>
<p>The question catches you off-guard. </p>
<p>You have many names, but none of them are your own. </p>
<p>You suppose you must have had a name at one point, as all things do, but you have as much use for a name as a storm does for the names given to them by meteorologists. Names are designations, titles assigned for the convenience of others. You have been alone for so long that your name has simply fallen into disuse, forgotten along with so much else of what once made you a person. </p>
<p>The thick red fog that envelops the parts of your mind not used for violence has made it difficult to recall any kind of life you may have had before your war against Hell. All you have are fragments; brief, hazy snatches of a world you can never return to, that sit at the bottom of your mind like start puzzle pieces discarded at the bottom of a toybox. </p>
<p>The cotton candy texture of the clouds as the sunset crests the horizon in a place you think you called home, once.</p>
<p>The sound of a gentle wind caressing dry grass.</p>
<p>A rabbit with soft brown fur, like velvet beneath your callused fingers. </p>
<p>Daisy. Her name was Daisy. </p>
<p>You’re not even sure why you remember this. You’re not sure you want to, because it pains you in a way that you can’t make sense of. </p>
<p>On the battlefield, the demons that are capable of speech curse you in their own bestial tongues. Their name for you emerges from their mouths as a scream, torn from their throats by fear, hatred, and in some instances horrified disbelief. To them you are a boogeyman, a figure as monstrous and inevitable as Death itself. Many of them do not wish to believe you are real until it is too late. </p>
<p>Your name is a four letter word. It drips as poison from their mouths and hisses like bile upon the stones into which it has been carved in the shores of Hell. The tales of your great and terrible anger are fables rooted in fact, just as the stories of bears and wolves and other such horrors lurking in the woods have been used to frighten human children into obedience for centuries. </p>
<p>You cannot recall the last time you were addressed by any name that was not an epithet given to you by those who hate and fear you.</p>
<p>Most often, they call you the Doom Slayer. </p>
<p>You have heard this one used by former humans, roared as a warning to the demons whose ranks they have unwillingly defected to, the words repeated like a chant in the native languages of those that dwell in Hell, heralding your approach and etching panic in the hearts of all those that hear it. </p>
<p>Even the UAC has its own name for you. After being made aware of your exploits, the first thing they did was copyright your likeness, manufacturing a special edition variant of their UACguy figurines that is now highly sought after by collectors. Only a handful have ever been produced, the cynical relics of a catastrophe that cost tens of thousands of lives, and one is currently in your possession. </p>
<p>You found it by chance while rooting through an office that lay beyond a locked door. The mangled bodies of the guards outside the gore-spattered security door seemed to signify that something of great importance lay within, but where your hopes had been for weapons and ammunition, what you found instead was the workstation of some likely long-dead bureaucrat. </p>
<p>The individual’s importance, if any, escaped you. Motivated by the necessity of violence and the means with which to conduct it, you paid the flickering messages on the cracked computer screen on the desk no heed, nor any of the paperwork strewn about the floor, a few sheets hastily stuffed into the overburdened shredder before whoever had been using it had begun tearing the blood-streaked sheafs apart with their bare hands in desperation.</p>
<p>A cursory search of the desk drawers turned up no ammunition or keycards, but just as you were about to move on you spied the figurine from the corner of your peripheral vision, standing untouched among the carnage like an effigy. </p>
<p>The demons may curse you by the very name they have given you, and they will gleefully indulge in the senseless destruction of UAC facilities when there are no more living souls to make playthings of, but the ransacked office had somehow escaped the tide of wanton destruction.</p>
<p>It seems fanciful to you that the denizens of Hell should be superstitious, but it almost appeared that the presence of your the figurine had warded them away, as though they feared that damaging your likeness would be thought of as an insult and invoke your wrath, like the idol of a vengeful god desecrated by non-believers. </p>
<p>You don’t know what made you take the figurine, but you have to admit that, proportions notwithstanding, it was a pretty good likeness. </p>
<p>Perhaps taking cues from the most common appellation given to you by the demons, the figurine was labeled <em> Doomguy </em> in a catalogue you later found during one of your many searches for supplies, listed as an ultra-rare variant alongside the coveted <em> Goldguy</em>, cast from the precious metal of its namesake and released in a limited run to celebrate the UAC’s 80th anniversary, and <em> Patriotguy,</em> a star-spangled red, white and blue variant produced for a Fourth of July celebration in the late 21st century. </p>
<p>Part of you still seethes at the idea that the very corporation responsible for inflicting Hell upon its own employees is content to leave you to clean up their mess while using you as a marketing tool, but something still made you take the figurine. That same something made you tear out the page of the catalogue and pocket it for future reference, and now it makes you produce it from within one of the pouches magnetized to your armor, which are mostly empty save for a handful of loose shells and some well-used keycards. </p>
<p>You show the page to Rover, tensing ever so slightly as he leans forward to squint at the point you are indicating on crumpled paper. </p>
<p>“Oh, that’s you?”</p>
<p>A nod. Whatever reaction you might have expected- awe, fear, revulsion- Rover does not appear to display any of them. Instead, he smiles. </p>
<p>“Doomguy, huh? Well, that’s a fantastically great name!” the cat asserts cheerfully. “You seem like a pretty cool guy to me!” </p>
<p>You do not know how to respond to this, and so you remain silent. </p>
<p>“So...Doomguy. Tell me, where are you headed today?”</p>
<p>Again, you do not know how to respond. Again, you remain silent. The cat leans forward once more, squinting at the paper in your hand, and his eyes follow the length of your pointer finger to where it is pinching the page, fixing on a single word.  </p>
<p>“You’re going to Deimos?”</p>
<p>You give a sudden start as the name materializes on your HUD, for it is the first vestige of familiarity you have been presented with thus far. The smaller and outermost of the twin moons of Mars, Deimos plays host to a UAC facility; thus, it can be reasonably assumed that there are also demonic forces present within it. </p>
<p>The familiar, adrenal warmth of bloodlust begins to build within you as you sense an opportunity to return to your quest, your pulse accelerating from a steady pounding to a gallop. You nod cautiously, tentative but intrigued. </p>
<p>“Hey, I know that place!” the cat asserts. “Deimos is one of my favorite vacation spots!”</p>
<p>You cannot help but be skeptical of this. Perhaps your premature optimism was just that. </p>
<p>“So, can I ask why you’re headed there?”</p>
<p>How are you supposed to answer this question? In a sense it is a great more straightforward than your name, for you have a clear goal in mind, but how are you supposed to quantify the nature of your crusade, the burden that you alone have chosen to carry? You have chosen to walk the path of eternal torment, but at what cost? Something more noble than revenge for a slight against you, or something less noble than the hope that you might just save anyone else from undergoing what you have suffered? </p>
<p>Abruptly, you remember you’re talking to a cat- or not talking to one, in actual fact- and begin to feel foolish for questioning the ramifications of your own private war against Hell. </p>
<p>Apparently, this silence is interpreted as reluctance. Rover frowns at you, pawing his chin.</p>
<p>“Whaaaat? You’re not gonna tell? Hmm. Now I’m even more curious…boy, I wonder…”</p>
<p>After a few moments of thought it gives a little start, apparently excited by its own conclusion.</p>
<p>“Oh, wait! I’ve got it! Yeah! Are you perhaps moving to a new town?”</p>
<p>The funny little creature’s line of questioning is careening from one non sequitur to another, only heightening the strangeness. A new town? You suppose there must be housing facilities for UAC personnel stationed on Deimos, but to call the prefab accommodation blocks twinned with the industrial facilities there a town seems something of a generous overstatement. </p>
<p>You nod distantly, more to ward off the question than anything. Rover’s eyes widen in surprise. </p>
<p>“What? Really?!”</p>
<p>The exaggerated features flicker from surprise to mirth. The cat’s rounded body rocks back and forth in laughter as the pitch of its babbling dialect raises in delight.</p>
<p>“Mya ha ha! I got it right on my first try!”</p>
<p>Laughter. Another thing you’d almost forgotten existed. </p>
<p>There is is little doubt in your mind that the demons laugh at their victims, relishing their pain and terror as they spend their final moments reduced to hoping for death- they make sport of such cruelty, even during the occasions in which you have witnessed infighting among their ranks- but as alien as this creature’s vocalizations are to you, they are nothing like the vicious and varied tongues of the hellspawn who snarl and shriek and curse the very sight of you. </p>
<p>You feel your mouth twitch beneath your visor. </p>
<p>“Well now, moving into a new place!” Rover goes on, dialing down his good humor from amusement to his usual probing friendliness. You have only known them a few minutes, but even as someone who has spent an interminable time alone with nobody but corpses for company, you get the distinct impression that the cat is happiest when he is making someone else’s business his own.  </p>
<p> “A whole new LIFE, even!” the cat’s monologue continues. “You must be really excited, right?”</p>
<p>You nod vaguely, as if to say sure, why not. Rover’s already broad smile seems to widen further.</p>
<p>“I certainly hope you find happiness!”</p>
<p>Happiness. </p>
<p>Now that you think about it, you seem to have forgotten what that truly means, too. </p>
<p>Your work does not make you happy. It satisfies you, for as long as your lust for violence against demonkind can reasonably remain satisfied when there are so many of them, but it does not make you happy. </p>
<p>There is a thrill to it, to be sure. The heady rush of combat, the sensation of tearing meat and bone asunder with your hands, the thunderous bark of your weapons, the swiftness and purpose of your movements as you formulate strategies on the fly, adapting, improvising, overcoming. </p>
<p>It is thrilling, but the thrill is like a drug. Once you have ridden out the high, coming down leaves you with nothing but emptiness to sustain your unquenchable rage. </p>
<p>In triumph, there is glory and there is justice…but happiness? No. Once the adrenaline has subsided and the flames of your fury have petered into the embers of hatred that smolders eternal within you, waiting patiently for the flames to be stoked by conquest once more, you are not happy. </p>
<p>You can’t remember the last time you were ever truly happy, and yet the cat’s words stir something within you. A small act of kindness is not a small thing to one who has borne witness to the very depths of depravity that demons are capable of. </p>
<p>At a loss once again for how to respond, you are interrupted by that same, strange, babbling language emanating from an overhead speaker. </p>
<p>“<em>Now arriving in Deimos! Deimos Station!</em>”</p>
<p>It reminds you of the UAC facility’s announcement system, prompting you to be seated for departure before you found yourself in an entirely different train to the one you set off in. You remember that same voice assuring you that the corporation responsible for opening the gates of Hell cares about the quality of life of its employees, encouraging you to please take advantage of their quality medical and mental health care services. </p>
<p>The forced conviviality of those announcements always sets your teeth on edge. You almost prefer the matter-of-factness of the warnings about malfunctioning reactor cores and gas leaks carried. At least they weren’t trying to convince you that everything was fine and there was nothing to worry about whilst you were knee-deep in the dead. </p>
<p>“Oh, hey! Looks like we’re about to arrive in Deimos!” Rover observes, peering out the window before turning his gaze back to you. “Thanks for chatting with me! It’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed a train ride this much!”</p>
<p>You give another respectful nod, following his gaze. The sky outside is the calm, pale blue of Earth’s atmosphere, not the inky, star-speckled blackness of space; the train is easing to a halt between what appears to be some kind of mountain range, but the rock formations have nothing in common with the cratered, barren atmosphere of Mars or either of its moons. </p>
<p>“Come to think of it,” Rover muses, drawing your focus away from the disquieting absence of what you have grown used to, “I’ve been riding the rails an awful lot again lately. Haven’t done this much traveling by train since 2002 or so…man, that’s weird.”</p>
<p>He doesn’t know the half of it, you find yourself thinking. Apparently, your personal metrics for what constitutes weirdness are spaced very differently. </p>
<p>“<em>This stop is Deimos! Everyone for Deimos, stop here! Eek eek!</em>”  </p>
<p>The cat’s legs are dangling over the edge of his seat while you are hunchbacked in your own, knees bent, your feet against the floor. The top of your helmet knocks against the ceiling as you draw yourself up. A creak emanates from the sagging seat cushions. If Rover notices this, he gives no indication of it. </p>
<p>“Okay, good luck Doomguy! Bye-bye!”</p>
<p>The cat waves at you as you trudge towards the door. You hesitate for a moment, then wave back. It just seems like the thing to do.</p>
<p>You make your way down the aisle. Your shotgun hangs at your side like carry-on luggage. Uncertainty slows the pace of your movements. You are unused to the sensation, and find yourself consciously resisting your muscle memory’s attempts to turn each footfall into the beginning of a sprint. </p>
<p>You have grown accustomed to the idea that standing still is death. If you are to be a target, better to be a moving target than a static one. Any hit that can be taken by your armor should be avoided. Armor should be thought of as a safety net, protection from attacks that cannot be dodged. </p>
<p>You never remain in one place longer than is absolutely necessary, always moving, throwing yourself into the fray with what could be thought of reckless abandon but is actually the key to victorious combat. You rely on the element of surprise, and when you do not have surprise then panic and confusion must suffice. You live by the adage that the best defense is a good offense, and demons die by it. </p>
<p>This ideology does not do you much good when there are no demons present.  The absence of anything trying to kill you makes you uneasy, for you know this respite cannot last. </p>
<p>The train attendant smiles as you pass, doffing his cap respectfully as he shows you towards the door. He is of similar height and build to Rover, with beady black eyes and large ears. Like Rover, he is not wearing any pants or shoes. His long tail is curled behind him, shiny golden buttons standing proudly against the light blue fabric of his coat. </p>
<p>The train attendant is a monkey. This makes about as much sense as anything else that’s happened to you over the past ten minutes.</p>
<p>You return the nod, stepping out of the door and onto the platform, tensing at the gentle hiss of the doors closing behind you. </p>
<p>As the chuffing of the train’s steam-driven engine recedes into the distance, you scan your surroundings and find them no less alien than that of the train. Stone tiles beneath your feet, wooden benches, an old-fashioned clock that displays the time with a pair of hour hands instead of a twenty-four hour number display. An archway ahead of you frames the brightness of whatever world lays beyond. </p>
<p>Dimly, it occurs to you that the health indicator on your HUD reads 100%. </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Welcome, Slayer</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Now is the time. </p><p>Two Titans meet - as it was written.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I just wanted to take a moment to say a huge and sincere thank you to everyone who’s commented and left kudos on this so far. </p><p>I honestly wasn’t expecting this to blow up like it did, but the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. I’ve had so many comments that I just couldn’t reply to them all, because there’s only so many ways I can reiterate “thank you so much, I’m so grateful for your feedback!” before it sounds like I’m just copying and pasting responses. I don’t want to sound trite or insincere, but if you have commented thus far then I just want you to know that I’ve more than likely seen your comment first thing in the morning when I checked my emails and it made me smile. </p><p>I read every single comment left on my work, even if I don’t always reply to them, and when I’m not feeling great- just in general, or about my abilities as a writer- then the chances are that you taking a few seconds to leave a comment or kudos has inspired me to keep doing what I do, so if you’re reading this, thank you. You are directly responsible for this story being written, and I really hope you enjoy this chapter, because judging by the comments it’s the one you’ve all been waiting for...</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>You step out of the train station and into a world that is not your own. </p><p>A canopy of cloudless blue sky presides over a landscape of lush greenery that stretches to the furthest reaches of the horizon. You feel a cool breeze brush lightly against your exposed skin, momentarily interrupting the warmth of the early-morning sun that forces you to squint as your visor adjusts to the brightness. </p><p>The terrain is soft, almost spongy beneath your feet. The change is disconcerting. You have grown used to unyielding metal and concrete, rivers of blood that threaten to turn every misstep into a lethal fall and lakes of corrosive slurry that eat away at your boots. In the world you know, everything is trying to kill you; here, the very ground beneath you relents as though it cannot bear the weight you carry. </p><p>Several blobby, stubby-limbed humanoids stand before you in a loose semicircle, bright and cheerful as toys lovingly arranged for a child’s tea party. Their proportions mirror the cartoonish simplicity of the cat on the train, but their body language somehow suggests polite expectancy, all wide eyes and broad smiles. One of them appears to be a deer, peering at you through half-lidded eyes that widen slightly as it looks you up and down. </p><p>“Yo, you see that guy?” it asks in a stage whisper, nudging the creature beside it. The circular ears, pointed snout and long, thin tail indicate to you that it is a mouse, although it stands at roughly the same height as the deer and is apparently also capable of talking.</p><p>“I bet that’s him!” the mouse replies, without even bothering to keep its voice down. A pair of beady black eyes are fixed on you, mouth stretching into a grin so impossibly broad it could give a Cacodemon a run for its money. </p><p>“What are we waiting for?” pipes up another voice, belonging to a creature that resembles  nothing so much as a teddy bear, even in the company of animals that belong in a child’s bedroom. “Let’s just say hi already!”</p><p>“OK everyone, here we go!” chimes in another voice. The words have a distinctly bouncy, enthusiastic tone, even though the dialect is little more than a high-pitched babble which your HUD interprets in the form of subtitles. “From those of us in Deimos…”</p><p>“…WELCOME!”</p><p>The word is cheered as a greeting by all present, book-ended by a round of applause as the one who prompted it trots over to you, bouncing with barely-suppressed excitement even when she stands still. </p><p>Her fur is a pale daffodil yellow, a fringe hanging above her eyes while a bun tied up with a band of red elastic sits atop her head. Her ears are large and floppy, and her fluffy tail beats at the air behind her in short, rapid strokes as though bothered by invisible flies. She is no less an animal than the others- a dog, by your reckoning- but not content with simply having styled her fur as a human might style their hair, she also wears clothes.</p><p>A green checkered vest is buttoned over a neatly ironed white shirt, a red ribbon tied at the collar in the manner of a bow tie. She wears a navy blue skirt but no shoes or socks, bobbing on bare feet with a festive jingling sound. The red band that holds her bun up has a little silver bell tied to it; the bun adds a good three or four inches on to her height, and yet it barely reaches your waist. The creature is forced to crane her neck as she smiles up at you, the corners of her mouth angling towards rosy cheeks. </p><p>“Mayor! We’re so happy you’re finally here!”</p><p>For a split-second, you think you may have misheard her. The notion that your hearing has been affected by gunfire, explosions, head injuries and repeated use of a chainsaw in a manner that violates official UAC health and safety mandates on just about every conceivable level doesn’t seem as outlandish as the reality of your situation. How could your arrival possibly have been anticipated?</p><p>Then you remember that the words are little more than noise whose meaning is deciphered by your helmet, and as you consider the possibility that your HUD might be malfunctioning, another possibility presents itself: could she have called you- or at least, <em> meant </em> to call you- <em> Slayer? </em></p><p>Your consternation must show on what little is visible of your face, because she presses on with a knowing smile, as though you have just said something exceptionally funny. </p><p>“Oh, come on! Quit joking around! You know exactly who you are! You told us which train you’d be arriving on!”</p><p>You wonder at the impossibility of this, and find you are unable to recall when you last spoke to anyone. Certainly there are no living humans left on Mars or its moons, for the demonic invasion ended as quickly as it began. </p><p>In your world, every mangled corpse has a story to tell, and the stories told by the bodies of UAC security personnel are perhaps the most depressing stories of all. You recall hastily erected barricades of upended tables, metal crates and whatever other furniture wasn’t welded to the floors torn aside by unnatural strength, windows of safety glass billed as “indestructible” by the UAC’s quality assurance division streaked with bloody handprints. Those equipped to fight back lasted only as long as their ammo; often, you would find uniformed corpses strewn among the remains of those they died trying to protect. </p><p>Every weapon you find still loaded once belonged to someone who fired it anger, in the defense of themselves or others. Every time you top off your magazines, you promise the dead that you will make their ammunition count, for you can offer them nothing else. </p><p>You do not dignify your enemies with threats or curses, for to speak is unnecessary, a wasted effort. You do not know if demons can understand human speech, and even during your earlier, experimental forays you never cared to find out. Your focus has always been on how to kill, not communicate. </p><p>No doubt the security personnel yelled warnings at the invaders, or tried first to reason with the puppeteered corpses of their colleagues, the only monsters that looked enough like people to evoke a fatal moment of hesitation. No doubt those who lived long enough to realize that fighting back was futile tried to plead for their lives, and like those who fell in their defense, discovered too late that they should have given themselves a bullet when they still had the chance. </p><p>Your fury is tranquil. It is silent. You let your shotgun speak for you. The bark of its report echoes through corridors of metal and concrete, a preacher warning the wicked of their impending judgement. The time to repent has long since passed, and the wages of sin are buckshot and broken bones. </p><p>Your shotgun has nothing to say now, hanging uselessly at your side like a crippled limb. The creatures before you are not targets, and so you stand in dumbfounded silence until the little dog talks again, still wearing the smile of someone reacting to a joke you cannot understand. </p><p>“You’re such a kidder!” she says, answering your silence with the tactful laughter of one who wishes to acknowledge a joke without seeming insincere. “Well, a sense of humor is an important trait for an elected official to have. You said you’d arrive on this train, and here you are!”</p><p>You glance from side to side, searching for objection and finding none. All eyes are on you, but the presence of the armored, shotgun-toting behemoth in their midst evokes nothing less than polite smiles and nothing more than mild wonderment.</p><p>“You can’t fool me!” the little dog insists, apparently interpreting the gesture as a shake of your head and continuing in the vein of playful insistence at your imagined wit. “No one else got off the train!” </p><p>That much, at least, you cannot argue with. </p><p>“Well, let’s continue this discussion at the town hall, shall we?” she prompts, concluding a dialogue that you have contributed nothing to except a blank stare. “Here’s a map of Deimos for your reference, Mayor.”</p><p>She presents you with an old-fashioned map, a neat cross marking the lines of where the paper was folded. Somehow, this is perhaps the most curious thing you have encountered so far. You have walked miles of corridors that stretch and divide in regimented branches of mathematical regularity, leaving demon corpses in your wake like breadcrumbs so as not to lose your way if you are forced to backtrack. The uniformity was supposed to make them easy to navigate, and so the UAC elected not to have maps of their facilities made.</p><p>Whether this was the result of something as innocuous as ignorance or simply corporate cost-cutting, you still aren’t sure. In any case, the paper map is a small wonder to you. It takes you a full three seconds of staring at it to realize that the line of pale blue snaking in a twisting, random path through the backdrop of green is meant to signify a river. </p><p>The little dog waits patiently as you consult the legend, the wag of her tail decelerating from a blur to merely breakneck speed. The train station is represented by a pink, rectangular icon, while the smaller, triangle-shaped green blocks are clearly meant to be houses, labelled with words that you suppose are meant to be the names of the people that live in them.</p><p>Your eyes travel down the list. Bob, Samson, Eunice, Aziz…<em>Static? </em> </p><p>You glance up for a moment, counting four of the creatures against twice as many names on your list. Is <em> people </em> even the right word for them? Many of them vaguely resemble terrestrial animals of your world, but they carry themselves like people, walking on two legs, wearing clothes. They even have their own language- which, though as alien to you as the roars and shrieks of your Hell-borne quarry, translates into expressions that you understand. You know what a <em> mayor </em>is; it is only when the expression is applied to you that it loses its meaning.</p><p>Perhaps after spending so long alone, merely hearing a voice has anything to say beyond pre-recorded corporate platitudes is bizarre to you. You have grown used to being greeted by inhuman shrieks, responding to fear and aggression with violence. The only smiles you were treated to prior to your encounter with Rover were not smiles at all; the perpetual rictus of a Revenant’s skull before its jawbone dropped open to let loose a tongueless shriek, or the fatuous, jagged curvature of a Cacodemon’s maw, a creature possessed not even of the ability to conceive thoughts more complicated than <em> feed. </em></p><p>The town hall is represented by a purple rectangle, and appears to be only a short distance away. Lacking any other objective and spurred by the desperate need to move as much as to follow the instructions, you set off for it.</p><p>“Oh- Mr. Mayor! Mr. Mayor! Wait for me, please!”</p><p>It takes a full five seconds for the little dog to catch up, jingling all the way. She is visibly out of breath, her already rosy cheeks flushed with exertion, clasping her clipboard to her chest as though she believes it might stop her from wheezing. You feel a little guilty- embarrassed, even- which is especially uncomfortable for one unused to such a sensation.</p><p>“Goodness!” she pants, managing a weak smile. “Excuse me! I’m a little out of shape, but…you clearly take physical fitness <em> very </em>seriously!”</p><p>Her eyes dwell on your exposed biceps for a fleeting moment, and she quickly averts her gaze in a way that suggests she is making a conscious effort not to stare. She is more correct than she knows, for your body is as much an instrument of death as your shotgun. Your day-to-day existence is your regimen, an ascetic routine of endurance and strength training, with demon bodies standing in for weights and punching bags. Your workouts are high-intensity, and last only as long as it takes for your equipment to stop trying to fight back. Invariably, they invariably break before you can get much use out of them.</p><p>It’s a great deal more simple than that, however. The reality is that she must take four or five steps for every stride you take, and she’s just trying to be polite. This is something that comes to her a lot more naturally than it does to you.</p><p>It is an effort to slow your steps, but you manage. She trots alongside you at something approaching a jog, her clipboard under her arm, interjecting snippets of small talk into a walk that is otherwise silent. She comments on the weather, and remarks how nice it is to get some fresh air. You agree with a nod, and not just to be polite. </p><p>This place is no less alien to you than its inhabitants, but it is beautiful in a way that even you can appreciate. It is unspoilt by pollution and industry and teeming unapologetically with life, the buzzing of small insects intertwining with lilting birdsong as wild grass crunches and rustles underfoot. There are buildings too, picturesque little boxes with lazily sloping roofs and chimneys that spout smoke in cheerful little puffs, every bit as cutesy as the creatures that you realize now must live in them.</p><p>Even a crudely constructed shack of corrugated iron that your map tells you belongs to <em> Static </em> is clearly a home, inviting in its own folksy way. The barbed wire fence surrounding it sits no higher than your knee, and you find yourself thinking that it wouldn’t last very long in a demonic invasion, almost tempting a smile from you until it brings with it an unwilling recollection of the devastation at the UAC facility and scrubs away your good humor like a bucket of water to the face. </p><p>The environment is effortlessly and organically peaceful, and memories of UAC installations surface in your mind as half-remembered snapshots, brief impressions of things you once committed to memory when doing so served a purpose in your war against Hell. Now, it seems, they are not worth remembering. You find yourself unwilling or unable to picture anything beyond the same bland stretches of flattened concrete and stamped metal. Did any of it ever look any different? Does it even matter? </p><p>You navigate a winding course between a sprawl of untamed arbor, and even though the density of the vegetation forbids you from moving in a straight line your movement feels less constricted than the claustrophobic, regimented atmosphere of your workplace. This world is wild, chaotic but peaceful. It makes you feel free in all the ways that the corpse-strewn corridors of the UAC facilities made you feel trapped.</p><p>You have felt trapped for as long as you can remember, trapped in your war against Hell,  but you are no mere victim of circumstance. You alone are fated to walk the path of perpetual torment, a path of your own choosing. You are charged with that which no other man can do, for someone has to do it. Your crusade is just and righteous and terrible, and you carry your burden as a king carries his crown. </p><p>“Oh, here we are!”</p><p>The town hall is larger than the other buildings, the facade of its stone pillars and old-fashioned clock making it appear positively gothic against the rustic construction of the little houses you saw before. </p><p>The little dog holds the door open for you, and you spend a moment regarding the dimensions of the frame before her polite gaze spurs you to action. </p><p>You duck to avoid the top of the frame, but even that is not enough. Your shoulders are the width of the door and then some. Ultimately, you are forced to shuffle through, crab-like, almost on your knees as the little dog dithers unhelpfully beside you. </p><p>The inside of the building is of furnished wood, and the vaulted ceiling is just high enough to accommodate you- or so you think. You straighten up, not even to your full height but just a little too quickly, and are greeted with a crunch of splintering wood and a squeal from somewhere by your left knee. </p><p>“Oh my goodness! Mr. Mayor, are you alright?!”</p><p>You are fine. The same cannot be said of the ceiling. The mere act of drawing yourself up has left an ugly indentation on one of the support beams, with sharp splinters exploding angrily from the point of impact. The little dog winces, and then affects a weak smile. </p><p>“Well, thank goodness you were wearing that helmet! Very practical. It’s reassuring to know that you take health and safety so seriously, Mr. Mayor!”</p><p>You feel you should apologize for the damage, but all you can offer is a sheepish glance. The little dog interprets this as such, but responds only with a bright (if dismissive) smile. </p><p>“Oh, not to worry, Mr. Mayor! The town hall is long overdue for remodeling anyway,” she assures you, with almost unnerving cheerfulness. “I’ll be sure to have the estimates for the cost of replacing the ceiling ready by the next budget meeting!”</p><p>Motes of dust drift from ceiling to floor as she talks, sparkling like little stars as they catch the sunlight in their descent. The dog beams at you, still maintaining that cheerful tone as her thoughts segue from one order of business to the next.</p><p>“Mr. Mayor, this town hall will be your base of operations.” She gives a little start, seemingly surprised at her own forgetfulness. “Oh, and I completely forgot to mention, I’m on staff here too!”</p><p>More dust motes join their fellows as she smiles through their passage in sunlight. “I’m Isabelle, your secretary, and I’m here to help you in any way I can.”</p><p><em> Isabelle. </em> The word elicits a small smile that she cannot see. It is pretty, pleasant to hear even in her strange, babbling language. Your HUD assigns it to her, matching it to her voice and replacing the question marks that stand before the words transcripted when she speaks, committing it to memory as it does with anything more notable than a demon. Those exist only in your suit’s memory as target data, for they do not converse with you. Your armor would probably be capable of translating their speech, but the fact is you really don’t care. Their screams tell you everything that you care to know. They are simply more statistics to be logged along with your health, armor integrity, and how much ammunition you are carrying. </p><p>“But if I may be frank,” Isabelle continues, her smile shrinking- though not vanishing entirely- “I was surprised to see someone as…” </p><p>She appears to hesitate, grasping for the words to describe the shotgun-toting mountain of armored muscle and death that stands before her now like a naughty schoolboy, optimistic that the principal’s reprimand for a minor misdemeanor is coming to a close with the mention of his usually good grades. </p><p>“That is, um…our former mayor held the position for many, many years,” Isabelle explains, doing her best to disguise the fact that she was quite unable to describe you in a way she thought wouldn’t sound unprofessional. “He was quite…set in his ways,” she says, as tactfully as she’d wanted to be when failing to describe you. “But youth is a breath of fresh air- exactly the new image our town needs! You’re perfect for the job!”</p><p>You crane your neck ever so slightly, glancing up to the ruined ceiling and then back down to Isabelle. This gesture goes entirely unnoticed as she busies herself with her clipboard, leaving you to puzzle over her remark about youth. </p><p>“All right…first of all, we must complete your resident registration. A mayor really should be a resident!”</p><p>She laughs politely, a whimsical little sound that almost distracts you from the unease that gnaws at you every time that word flirts across your HUD. <em> Mayor</em>. It must be a misunderstanding on her part, and yet she seems entirely convinced that is why you are here. If you did come here for a reason, none has presented itself to you thus far. There are no demons to be slain here. There is nothing to fight or kill. It is not the first time you have traveled the divide between worlds, but nothing about your presence in this one makes any sense. </p><p>“So, what is your name, Mr. Mayor?”</p><p>You look blankly at her. What are you supposed to tell her? That you are the Doom Slayer, the Hell Walker, the Unchained Predator who sought retribution in all quarters, dark and light, fire and ice, in the beginning and the end? </p><p>“Do you have any form of identification? Maybe a driver’s license, or a passport…?”</p><p>You have no driver’s license. You have trod rock and metal and bone, carried through toxic slurry, blistering flame and cold vacuum by nothing but the armor that has become your second skin. You have no passport, for your crusade has been at nobody’s direction but your own, facilitated by nothing but rage and sanctioned only by sheer, unbreakable will. </p><p>“Any kind of ID is fine,” Isabelle pipes up, undeterred. “Just something we can use to expedite the process, you know.” </p><p>You are the Destroyer to those you hunt, regarded first as an Outlander by those who would later herald you as the Right Hand of their Creator when you wore the crown of the Night Sentinels. Your titles are carved into the tablets of Hell and branded into the collective subconscious of the damned, whispered of in legend and cursed by those who so desperately wish you were just that.</p><p>You are the Slayer of Titans, the Breaker of Gates; the Beast That Will Not Die. </p><p>“I’ll take care of all the paperwork, naturally. That’s what I’m here for!”</p><p>
  <em> Paperwork.  </em>
</p><p>The word stirs something in your mind, for it recalls the bureaucracy of the UAC, their obsession with numbering and notating everything during their inane attempts to commodify Hell. You reach into your equipment pouches, feeling past shotgun shells, keycards for security doors, something small and soft strung on a length of chain, and finally your fingers close around a scrap of paper. You present it to Isabelle, who squints at it and then smiles. </p><p>“Doomguy,” she says, reading the name that the UAC’s marketing department liked enough to approve as a means of selling action figures based on your likeness. “Well, okay then! I guess that’ll do!”</p><p>The name isn’t any more unusual than Static, you suppose, but you’re relieved that she accepted it all the same. The only other form of identification that you have is stamped on your armor.</p><p><em>D22. 8623.</em> The significance of the numerals is lost to history, and to you. Only the symbol embossed into your helmet, a logogram of curved brushstrokes that vaguely resembles a blade thrusting downwards into rising flames, carries any meaning that you know of.</p><p>The Mark of the Slayer means death. It is a warning to Hell, a permanent reminder that you cannot be stopped.</p><p>“So, I have your name…what else?” Isabelle murmurs, speaking apparently to herself. “I’m sure there was something I-”</p><p>She gives a sudden little start, her jaw dropping open, aghast at the sudden realization that has gripped her. </p><p>“Oh no! I can’t believe I forgot something so vitally important! In order to register you as a town resident, we need your address for the form!” She looks to you as though dreading your response to what she’s about to ask, for she suspects she already knows the answer. “Doomguy, do you…have a place to live yet?”</p><p>You shake your head. Isabelle frowns, pawing ponderously at chin as her head tilts slightly to the side. </p><p>“Well…there aren’t any vacant houses here at present,” she observes, taking a few seconds to realize how unhelpful that is and looking suitably embarrassed, but then brightens. “Oh, but you can certainly build one! We really should have you decide where you’re going to live before we proceed!”</p><p>To her, this makes perfect sense. To you, it makes about as much as anything else you’ve come to expect from this place. </p><p>She sighs, shuffling her feet. “And here I made you come all the way to the town hall for nothing. I apologize for being so flaky!”</p><p>An apology is an oddity to you, the latest in a long line of things you don’t know how to respond to. Like the concept of a mayor, it is something you are aware of but have no practical experience to draw on. You know how to shuffle a deck of cards, how to tie shoelaces, how to whistle, but you can’t remember the last time you ever had a reason to do any of these things. The knowledge of them sits, growing dull like sheathed swords in the recesses of your mind while knowledge of how to kill is kept sharp through constant use. </p><p>You felt you should apologize earlier for breaking the roof of the town hall with your helmet, but Isabelle just brushed the destruction off like it was nothing. You wonder if you should do the same.  </p><p>“Um,” Isabelle says, anxious to change the subject or simply to break the awkward silence that accompanies your blank stare. “On the other side of the tracks, on Main Street, is Nook’s Homes…the real-estate office? Ah, this might make more sense if you take a look at your map!”</p><p>You unfold the paper, spreading it before you at arm’s length and studying it as Isabelle stands on tiptoes, guiding your eyes with a stubby forelimb, nearly toppling over in her eagerness to be of assistance. </p><p>“See the railroad tracks at the top of the map? Head north from there to get to Main Street. Some fresh air and exercise would do you good! Not that you need to exercise, obviously,” she adds, giving you a big smile that quivers slightly as she second-guesses her words yet again. “I mean, everyone needs exercise, of course- just- not just you, specifically- um, but yes! A trip to Main Street may be just what we both need! It’ll give me a chance to stay here and continue with your registration, and you need to find Nook’s Homes.”</p><p>Her demeanor changes so quickly you feel as though it may give you whiplash. In one moment she seems in her element, a picture of polite enthusiasm, absolutely unconcerned by that which the very mention of instills terror and hatred in that which dwells beyond the Ninth Circle; the next, she’s fumbling her way through apologies for her own supposed tactlessness, more scared by the thought of an imagined slight against you than she is of the loaded shotgun you carry. </p><p>“Once you’ve got a place to live, please come back here and let me know right away!” she implores you, having produced a pen from somewhere, already busying herself with her clipboard. It is an imperative framed as a polite request, bringing the exchange to a close and directing you to fulfil an objective.</p><p>It has been quite some time since anyone has given you an order, let alone one that you followed. You recall defying the wills of forces far mightier than this little creature, beings of great power and influence that framed their demands in no uncertain terms and expected nothing less than your silent obedience. </p><p>And yet you find yourself shuffling towards the door of the town hall, moving as if not in control of your actions. Your chagrin swells as you recall your earlier clumsiness, and you gingerly ease your armored bulk through a doorway that was designed for someone who stands barely as high as your knee. </p><p>You glance back to Isabelle as you wriggle through, finding once again that you are overcome with the urge to apologize for the spectacle you’re making and not fully understanding why. She glances up from her clipboard, giving you a little wave that is as genial and sincere as the smile she wears.</p><p>You’re not really sure why you wave back either, but you do it anyway. </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Agnus Dei</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Burnt offerings.</p><p>Small mercies.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Although you don’t realize it at first, you can hear the ocean.</p><p>Deimos is a coastal town, bordered by a bulwark of sheer vertical rock to the west. To the north is the train station, and beyond that lies Main Street.</p><p>Your objective is in sight. Your strides are as swift and purposeful as those of a march to war, but you find yourself becoming distracted. </p><p>The ground, the sky, and everything in-between is vibrant and colorful and pleasant to look at. Bright flowers sprout prettily from lush green grass, and thistles congregate in clumps of coarsely-toothed leaves. The forest is a disorderly orchard of apple-laden trees, unbowed and magnificent, their branches proudly bearing a crop of fruit so glossy it looks as though the skin has been polished in anticipation of your arrival.</p><p>The only plants you ever saw at the UAC were in glass cases stacked from wall to ceiling, the pitiful test subjects of the Corporation’s largely unsuccessful forays into terraforming. Unable to survive on the barren surface of Mars and its neighboring moons, they subsisted on artificial light and nutrient-infused moisture delivered at intervals, a routine as repetitive and regulated as those of the UAC’s human workers. Upper-tier UAC personnel are sometimes permitted to keep potted plants in their office, but their plastic leaves are as authentic as the company’s assurances that they care about the health and wellbeing of their employees- insistently referred to as <em> advocates </em>by official vocab guidelines. </p><p>Every decision the UAC makes is touted as a measure to improve efficiency and create a cohesive working environment that allows advocates to reach their full potential, but this is just a long-winded way of saying that they want to make as much money as possible. </p><p>The monotony of a seven-day work week is broken up by breaks that permit only as much time as is absolutely necessary to finish your meal, and they have even succeeded in making that an utterly joyless experience. The vending machines that offer ready-to-eat cheeseburgers, hot dogs, french fries and pizza at the push of a button are a source of wonderment to new advocates, as so many things to one experiencing the mercantile majesty UAC for the first time. </p><p>The old hands are no longer awed by the endless, yawning expanse of space, nor enthused by the ten or so ready meal options available to them. A hot, greasy pepperoni slice or plate of eggs and bacon dispensed from a vending machine is a novelty the first time; by the seventh or eighth repetition, it is wearisome. After a month of it, you find yourself so desperate for a salad that you are reduced to picking limp strands of lettuce out of your taco, dissecting a burger for a soggy slice of tomato, blotting the grease away on your UAC-branded paper napkin and savoring it as best you can.</p><p>The UAC has the technology to teleport objects and people through space, but even they have not perfected the art of reheating eggs and bacon. The bacon is always hard in a way that is unappetizing even to someone who likes their bacon crispy. The egg whites are rubbery, the yolks unpleasantly goopy despite being heated to one-hundred and sixty degrees- the temperature that most health departments, including the UAC’s own, agree is sufficient to kill contaminants such as salmonella. </p><p>A cynical explanation for this uncharacteristic concern may be that the UAC doesn’t wish its productivity to be affected by its workforce getting sick; more cynical yet is the likelihood that they simply wish to avoid any legal repercussions from a disgruntled advocate looking to claim worker’s comp. </p><p>Not that it would matter even if they did, of course. The UAC is a multi-billion dollar conglomerate with the best lawyers and PR specialists that money can buy. An old adage holds that there are two laws- one for the rich and one for the poor- but this is simply untrue. The truth is that there is no law for the rich. The only thing that stopped the UAC was its own hubris, and it was the worker caste that bore the punishment so richly deserved by the greedy executives who couldn’t keep their hands out of Pandora’s cookie jar. </p><p>Thousands of innocent people had to die for the UAC to realize that plumbing the depths of Hell was a bad idea. Every single person who died when the demons came was somebody’s son, somebody’s daughter- a parent, a sibling, a human being. They had lives. They lived and loved and were loved in turn by those who knew them. Not one of them will ever receive a proper burial, and you don’t suppose for a second that the UAC would have even pretended to care if the company shares hadn’t taken a nosedive.</p><p>A white butterfly flits past your visor, guiding your thoughts away from the dark, familiar place they’d begun to wander back to. It is such a little thing, and yet it instills in you the same sense of wonderment you get from the endless reach of the sky and the untamed sprawl of arbor.</p><p>You watch its path loop erratically around a bed of flowers before it appears to reach a decision, alighting on what you think (though you cannot be sure) is a rose. The jerky beats of its wings slow to a lazy rise and fall, and after a few moments it takes off again, bobbing past you as it sets off into the distance, drawing your gaze to the horizon.</p><p>You find yourself temporarily breathless, for the spectacle before you is perhaps the most beautiful, the most awesome, the most utterly alien yet.</p><p>A slope leads down to the beachfront, the soft white sand darkening to the hue of brown sugar as the waves lap the shoreline. The butterfly selects another tree along the way and does not stir as you pass it. The tiny creature is all but forgotten as you take in the splendor of the ocean. </p><p>The water shares the cool blue of the sky, sparkling merrily at the gentle touch of the sunlight and foaming around half-buried seashells and the soles of gore-stained boots. Your shotgun hangs at your side. </p><p>The sea seems to stretch forever, as infinite and indifferent as the vacuum of space, but there is a sense of being to it- something tangible, and in that respect it is comforting. The ocean is endless, but it is there. Space is merely an endless absence of anything that the distant, minute specks of stars and planets and the UAC’s ever-bloating bulk cannot possibly hope to fill.</p><p>Eventually, you come to your senses. You do not know how long you’ve been standing, staring. Your boots are gritty with sand. The viscera has dissipated like foam on the surf.</p><p>You head back up the slope, moving as if in a daze. Main Street. You need to go to Main Street and find…<em> Nook’s Homes. </em> Yes. That was it.</p><p><em> Home. </em> Somehow, that word means even less to you than <em> Nook. </em></p><p>The white butterfly is still resting on the tree, and as it takes off your gaze is drawn to the apples hanging from the branches. You cannot remember the last time you ate a piece of fruit. </p><p>You cannot remember the last time you ate anything, in fact.</p><p>You find yourself reaching for it almost unconsciously, and your fingertips are inches from the glossy skin when something stops you, something that has never stayed your hand from helping yourself to ammunition, keycards, tablets containing useful intelligence relating to your enemies, or even the effigy of yourself you found in a ransacked office.</p><p>The apple is not yours to take. </p><p>Even in the raw, untamed beauty of this place, the tree seems to belong to someone, and while you are perfectly content to requisition supplies from the UAC- and even from the unfortunate souls who perished in their service- you do not <em> need </em> the apple. You cannot shake the feeling that to take it would be stealing rather than mere salvage.</p><p>Your gaze is drawn to a small hut with a gently puffing chimney, and at once the reason for this feeling becomes clear. There is a sign by the door with a name on it, and the way the flowers outside have been planted, neatly ordered in rows of red, yellow and white, suggests that the owner of the house has cultivated a small garden.</p><p>The sign by the door says<em> Eunice’s house. </em></p><p>You reach for the door handle, and again, something stops you. After a moment’s pause you rap your gauntleted knuckles against the wooden door, and as that same cheerful, babbling dialect emanates from within the response scrolls across your HUD.</p><p>“It’s open! Come on in!”</p><p>You stoop to fit through the door, adopting a sort of crouch rather than straightening up. What happened at the Town Hall was a moment of humiliating clarity, branding your sense of spatial awareness with the disquieting knowledge that you do not belong in this place. The ceiling might accommodate you if you were to slouch, but you’d rather not risk it for much the same reason you were reluctant to take the apple. </p><p>This is someone’s home.</p><p>That someone proves to be a sheep. She is as short as the other creatures in this place and appears stoutly built, though it’s difficult to say how much of her figure is padded out by her fleece of navy blue wool. Her eyes are large and round with circular black pupils, her mouth a politely smiling little line etched into the pink skin of her muzzle. She wears no shoes, standing on cloven hooves, but appears to be wearing a scarf, white with a red-grid pattern.<br/>“Oh, hello there! You’re our new mayor!”</p><p>It is both a greeting and an observation, treated as a statement of fact. At no point is it a question.</p><p>“I ran into Bob earlier and he said that he’d seen you,” the sheep explains. The total lack of surprise in both her voice and her expression makes you wonder if this Bob deigned to mention the helmet, armor and double-barreled shotgun, but then you remember how enthusiastic the little animals were when you first arrived here. Perhaps the inhabitants of a world this peaceful simply cannot conceive of violence. Perhaps the gun is as meaningless to them as the language that your HUD interprets into English.</p><p>“I’m very sorry I couldn’t make it to the Station when you first got here,” the sheep says, her smile becoming a little smaller as the gentle, bleating cadence of her voice takes on a rueful tone. “I have to admit, I’m a little fussy when it comes to my house. I spilled rice milk all over the floor, and I just couldn’t leave until I mopped it up.” </p><p>She indicates a dark blot at the edge of the rug as though she thinks you may be skeptical of this. The damp patch corroborates the story, as does the mop and bucket propped up against the wall. </p><p>Beneath the rug, the floor is tiled with laminate wood rather than the metal you’ve become used to, and the room is lit by the pleasant glow of a lampshade rather than the harsh glare of strip-lighting. Sunlight filters in through the windows. A hi-fi stereo system with an integrated turntable stands at the end of the room, along with a grand piano and an old-fashioned television set. A basket of neatly-folded laundry sits atop the washing machine flanking the kitchenette unit tucked into the corner. There is even a potted plant, but the leaves don’t have the waxy luster of the ones you would occasionally see at the UAC. </p><p>The house is neat and orderly, but in a way that suggests a great deal of care has been taken in its presentation. The furniture and appliances have been laid out with comfort and accessibility in mind, not simply to capitalize on whatever space was available. The surfaces are free of dust, but there’s no chemical stink of disinfectant. The seating area smells faintly flowery. Nearer the kitchenette, there is something that you’re almost sure is the lingering scent of food, although it doesn’t smell like anything you’d find in a vending machine. </p><p>Eunice shifts her weight from one foot- or hoof- to the other, apparently sensing that you are appraising the surroundings. </p><p>“It’s not much,” she says, following your gaze from one side of the room to the other. “I know it must seem a little cramped to you, but I've tried to do little things here and there to make it comfortable.”</p><p>Your head is less than a foot from the ceiling even while stooping, but cramped is not the word you would use to describe this place. It feels lived-in. Cozy. </p><p>“Anyway,” Eunice says, quickly composing herself. “I’m so glad to meet you! My name is Eunice.” </p><p>She hesitates again, and you wonder if she’s realizing that you must have seen her name already on the sign outside the door. </p><p>“Well, um- if you ever need anything, please do give me a knock, won’t you? I’m a bit of a homebody, so you can generally always find me here, especially when it’s cold outside. There’s nothing nicer than a nice, warm room on a cold day, wouldn’t you agree?”</p><p>You nod distantly, unable to relate but not wanting to appear standoffish. The poor creature already seems a little flustered, although you suspect that has more to do with your silence than anything else. Her gaze barely rested on the shotgun in the crook of your arm for a second, glossing over it as though it was nothing more interesting than the mop and bucket in the far corner of the room.</p><p>“How are you finding Deimos so far?” she asks, still valiantly trying to make conversation with someone who has neither the faculties nor the inclination to do so. “Our little town is quite modest, but I’m sure you’re going to make it amazing to live in!”</p><p>You look at the apple tree outside the window. Eunice follows your gaze for a moment, and then politely returns her eyes to where she estimates yours to be behind your visor.</p><p>“Apples are Deimos’ native fruit,” she remarks, with a note of something approaching pride in her voice. “Have you tried one? They’re lovely and crunchy if you eat them fresh off the tree, but I like to use them in baking sometimes. You need a nice balance of tartness to sweetness when you’re baking, so Deimos’ apples are perfect no matter how you like them.”</p><p>Before you can even begin to wonder how best to communicate that you would like to be allowed to try one, Eunice has retrieved a basket of them from the kitchenette.</p><p>“Here,” she says, proffering it in your direction. “Take a few for the road, won’t you? I picked these earlier, but I won’t use all of them by myself.”</p><p>It seems this world has not yet finished surprising you. You have nothing to give in exchange for the fruit, and yet this stranger gives them freely, expecting nothing in return. They are a gift given willingly, free of charge, and this is a concept that simply does not exist in the transactional praxis that greases the wheels of the UAC’s workings and palms of its executives. Anything that is touted as being a benefit of employment within the corporation- from dental and medical coverage to food, water and bathroom breaks- is granted with the implicit understanding, outlined in the small print of a sixty-six page contract, that your life is simply another asset that can be liquidated at the whim.</p><p>You are not an employee of the UAC, although they would like to think of you as their property. You have never expected- much less received- any kind of compensation for your work cleaning up the messes they’ve made, besides the grim satisfaction of a job well done. A nod of acknowledgement is all you can offer to express your gratitude to Eunice, but she seems pleased by this.</p><p>“Do you like apple pie?”</p><p>You honestly aren’t sure. The vending machines at the UAC had offered it, but you’d never been tempted by it. The images on the corresponding buttons had shown a burger with fresh vegetables protruding out from under a neat, shapely bun and cheese that was perfectly melted, draped over the meat patty like a tablecloth, a hotdog with artistic squiggles of ketchup and mustard that overlapped in a red-and-yellow helix, French fries that were the golden-brown of suntanned bodies on expensive beaches.<br/><br/>The apple pie hadn’t looked appetizing, even with the embellishments. Cut into a wedge to reveal the filling, it showed whitish chunks set in a glistening, yellow-green substance that oozed thickly even in a still image. You dread to think how revolting the real thing must have looked if that’s the best the UAC’s marketing minds- the ones that touted a campaign to plumb energy from the depths of Hell itself as a good and sensible thing- could come up with.</p><p>“I’m very partial to apple pie,” Eunice says brightly. “I’ll have to bring you some once you’re settled in, as a housewarming present.”</p><p><em> Housewarming. </em>Another word that rapidly loses whatever meaning it held as your mind attempts to dissect it. Your mental faculties are attuned to precious little that is not directly concerned with the morbid nature of your work, but as you cast a searchlight into the antediluvian recesses of a mind that calculates and processes violence as efficiently as a computer, memories are laid bare as the mnemonic dust and cobwebs are swept away.</p><p>The memories and the thoughts attached to them are neatly boxed and sealed, once cherished but now useless, as sentimental things are in war. They were set aside for safekeeping while not in use, but the packaging is crumpled and tattered. Ensconced within your memory palace, they have been shunted aside to make way for weighty and contaminous thoughts of hatred and vengeance that leak like a faulty reactor, oozing odium more vicious and deadly than any resource the UAC have ever dabbled in- even that which they harvested from the guts of Hell itself. </p><p>Have the contents survived beneath layers of padding? Has the heat of the embers that tainted and blistered your soul warped them into something unrecognizable, or rotted them away altogether? </p><p>A house is a home. Your home is the battlefield. But have you ever truly been at home?</p><p>There was a time, wasn’t there? A time when you had a home. A time when Mars and her moons were but distant pinpricks in the star-speckled canopy of the night, a time when you felt the warmth of the sun and the coolness of the breeze on your skin, and soft brown fur beneath your fingertips.</p><p>The smell of freshly-brewed coffee. The gentle cadence of rain drumming on a window. A crackling fireplace. Vignettes of a life that no longer seems your own. </p><p>You do not have enough of an attachment to these things to even feel loss at their absence, and it is this realization that saddens you. </p><p>Eunice’s smile fades slightly, as though she can somehow sense the change in your own expression despite the visor shielding your face.</p><p>“You <em> do </em> have a place to stay, don’t you?”</p><p>You give a sudden start, then a guilty shake your head, burdened once again by the unfamiliar weight of embarrassment. Eunice looks aghast for a moment, but her joviality quickly returns from its leave of absence, shooing away sympathy and replacing it with benignant certitude that is clearly meant to ease your troubled thoughts.</p><p>“Oh, don’t worry. I’m sure Tom Nook will be able to sort you out with some accommodations. He’s over at Nook’s Homes, on-”</p><p><em> Main Street. </em> Your mind finishes her sentence a fraction of a second before she does.</p><p>You motion towards the door, communicating through pantomime that ought to be going, wishing you had some way of expressing your gratitude. Like a blade left to grow dull in its sheath, muscles grow stronger with use and weaken with disuse, but it is not simply atrophied vocal chords that prevent you from speaking. The desire to verbalize one’s thoughts and feelings is a natural, human compulsion, and therein lies the problem; you are something both more and less than human, and the only thoughts you have felt the urge to communicate are ones that can be delivered with your fists.</p><p>An old adage holds that a picture is worth a thousand words, but there are not enough words in your own language or any other to fully articulate the depths of your rage. Hence, a thrown punch, a stabbing blade, a pound of trigger pressure- these are your manifesto. Every stab wound, every bullet hole is an intaglio upon the bodies of your enemies. Sinewy flesh, chitinous hide and fetid meat are your canvas.</p><p>Deprived of your chosen medium, you are no longer an artist. You are simply starving. A castaway, stranded on a remote island that you have carved from the flesh of the world, a bleak and joyless refuge in an ocean of blood that rises as your conquests mount. </p><p>In the last days, it is said that the sea will give up the dead which are in it, just as Hell delivered up the dead which were in it. It is said that every man shall be judged according to his works, and your work is as terrible and pitiless as the coldness of space. You may rage against the judgement of the Order of the Six, the High Priests of Deag, the Chairmen of the Board, but one day you may be judged in kind.</p><p>Perhaps you already have. Perhaps your fight is your expiation. Or perhaps this world full of funny little talking animals will prove to be your penance.  </p><p>“Well, it was lovely to meet you!” Eunice says, waving cheerfully as you tuck your elbows into your abdomen and shuffle hunchbacked through the front door, like an adult dismissed from a child’s playhouse for violating the height restriction. “Good luck with the move! I hope it all goes well!”</p><p>You hope so too, but hope can be a dangerous thing.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Thank you so much to everyone who's left a comment or kudos so far, and I apologize for not responding to so many of you. I really wasn't expecting this to blow up the way it did when I first posted it, given that it was just meant to be a meme that got a bit out of hand, but even though the sheer volume of feedback I've received has been a little overwhelming I'm so pleased that my takes on these two very different fandoms has resonated with so many of you, whether you're a fan of both of them, one of them, or neither of them.</p><p>Even though I haven't responded to a lot of your comments, I want you all to know that I read every single one of them, and just knowing that you liked this story enough to leave feedback makes me indescribably happy. I'm going to make more of an effort to respond to your comments from here on out, and hopefully not keep you all waiting quite as long for another chapter. I really appreciate your patience, your encouragement and all your kind words. </p><p>Again, with utmost sincerity: thank you.</p>
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